Cruising Angels

SUMMARY

All aboard the Wayward Angel for a coma-inducing maritime adventure! Bosley is being shown around Charlie's yacht by Pat Justice, an attractive, Bosley-aged interior designer. She's decorated the boat for an upcoming voyage to the Caribbean as per his associate's (Charlie's) wishes, boasting vaguely that their company has interests worldwide. Pat seems charmed.

Back at the office, Tiffany and Kris are on paperwork duty, poring over empty manila folders and referencing non-existent cases. (You can tell they are hard at work because Kris has a pencil in her ear.) Bosley phones, mistaking Tiffany for Kelly (ha ha?) before summoning them all to the marina. When the Angels meet Pat and realize Bosley's trying to impress her, they begin to rudely tease him like a bunch of 8-year-olds; constant winking, smirking, exchanging of glances, and patronizing dialogue fill the duration of the scene.

Elsewhere in the marina, Captain Webner (whom Pat has hired for the Angel's voyage) is arguing with someone named Atamien, who you know is a bad guy because he's wearing a leather jacket. It seems Webner has damaged a boat, which messes up their plans for some kind of piracy scheme that already sounds boring. Needing a replacement boat, they nab the Wayward Angel that evening and use it to plunder another yacht. Webner gets stabbed in the shoulder while attacking its crew.

Long about midnight, Bosley and Pat return from a nice soft-focus candlelit dinner to discover the Wayward Angel is gone! He returns to the office to pace while Tiffany and Kris try to help him figure out what happened, still exchanging unwarranted smirks.

By the next day, the yacht has been returned to its slip, and Kris pantomimes mixing test tubes before announcing that she has found blood stains on the deck. Using the log to calculate that the boat was out for 45 minutes, they take it for a spin, trying unsuccessfully to find out where it might have gone.

Next, Poppie from Seinfeld is yelling at some guy named General Ranez about the attack on his boat. He's learned that Captain Webner is to blame, because he visited the harbor doctor for his stab wound. Bosley visits the harbor doctor's office, where he convinces a Little Orphan Annie-wigged nurse that he's a doctor and needs to see Webner's files.

Pat enters a miscellaneous room where Atamien and Webner are waiting - they're all in cahoots for a plot to smuggle gold out of the country. Once left alone, Atamien announces his plan to kill Webner after the scheme is complete, so that he and Pat can retire in paradise together with $7 million. A gross kiss then confirms that the two are an item.

Meanwhile, Poppie and another henchman kill Captain Webner.

Dopey music plays while the Angels, for some reason left alone in control, attempt to dock the boat. Tiff and Kris perform nautical buffoonery and Kelly crashes into the dock. They go into the cellar to assess the damage - aside from several broken bottles of wine, they find the cabinets filled with stacks of unexplained gold bullion. Uh oh!

Everyone deduces that Pat may be to blame, because she was the one who hired Captain Webner. Kelly visits "the sailor hangout" where she talks to a skeevy guy who pets her hair and keeps saying they're cousins. Semi-hostile dialogue of flirting/negotiation meanders boringly until he somehow volunteers Atamien's name. After having spent the whole conversation pushing him away and accusing him of lying, Kelly suddenly becomes seductive and tells him to wait for her while she goes to powder her nose. (Powder her nose meaning call Bosley, and then bail.)

Poppie and Ranez kill Atamien.

Alone together aboard the Wayward Angel, Bosley quietly confronts Pat about her involvement in the gold scheme - which he'd only just realized. She drops the act and appears genuinely sorry, but not as sorry as Bosley. Ranez and Poppie appear and hold them both at gunpoint. Just then Kelly calls, and Ranez listens in as she blabbers incriminating things. He takes the phone and warns that he'll kill Bosley if anyone contacts the authorities.

After a commercial break Kelly - er, an artist - stakes out the marina, pretending to draw on an easel yet also openly watching the Wayward Angel with binoculars from 30 feet away. The bad guys load Bosley, Pat, and the gold into an armored van, and the Angels pile into the Pinto to follow, which still seems weird without Sabrina in it.

The bad guys drive their armored truck to a warehouse where, upon arrival, Bosley jumps the driver and makes the truck crash. He grabs Pat and they escape, scurrying off into the warehouse hand-in-hand while Ranez fires shots after them.

Luckily, the fully-loaded Pinto has been idling 10 feet away watching all the action, and eventually the decision is made to crash the gate and give Bosley a hand. Tiffany apprehends a miscellaneous henchman while Kelly and Kris chase after the others. Bosley uses a fire extinguisher to knock down Ranez' sidekick. Victory is short-lived, though; in another moment, he and Pat are trapped like rats in front of a locked door. At the last second, Kelly and Kris draw their guns from some walkway above and stop Ranez from killing them. After a commercial break, the real police show up to cart away the bad guys - Pat has enough class to follow voluntarily. Bosley looks depressed.

Back at the office, Tiffany is perched in an unbelievable position on Bosley's desk as they inform Charlie that his yacht has been impounded for 3 months (tee hee!). Bosley flees the office to avoid being yelled at.

FILMING LOCATIONS

WHAT'D YOU THINK?

Rate this episode:

Excellent

Above Average

So-So

Meh

Bomb

CURIOSITIES

• Kris, what are you doing here? Opening scene-setting filler recycles stock footage of a girl surfing who they apparently forgot was Kris ('s stunt double) from Angels in Paradise. Remember the black bikini and yellow surfboard?
• Those manila folders literally are empty. Plain as day.
• This is the only time Bosley ever misidentifies an Angel on the phone - of COURSE it would be Tiffany. Sigh. (And she sounds nothing like Kelly.)
• Why is Bosley carrying a bottle of champagne back from the date after giving the girls a speech about how there's iced champagne/wine already on board?
• Why would someone stash heavy gold bullion in flimsy little overhead cabinets? The Wayward Angel's construction must've been deceptively strong - with your standard gold brick coming in around 27 lbs, just the gold visible in the single cabinet behind Tiff would weigh over 1,000 pounds.
• Since when are they so scientific about bloodstains? Since when does Kris carry around the little forensics field kit? As usual, they're obliterating evidence that the real police should be collecting.
• How is Tiffany able to climb up onto the side of the Wayward Angel after it has already gotten several feet too far away from the dock?
• If you like to fantasize that this show has any continuity at all, you can pretend they picked Kelly to drive the boat based on established boat-driving skills from Angels in Paradise. (The choice was random. Completely random. You know that.)
• Does Kelly personally intend to pay for the wine bottles she broke? How about the hull damage to the Angel she likely caused?
• Jaclyn sounds like she has a cold in the "kissing cousins" scene.
• Why didn't any of the bad guys have a problem with all 3 Angels sitting right outside their warehouse in the Pinto for several minutes watching their deal go down? In any other episode, a henchman would have come out with a gun to dispatch them.
• Why were the Angels able to get the jump on the bad guys inside their own warehouse when they didn't know the layout? Was it Angel Instinct that told Kris they needed to climb that ladder?

BAD GUYS BEAT DOWN

BIMBOS

SHOTS FIRED AT BOSLEY

SHOTS FIRED BY ANGELS

DAYS TO SOLVE CASE

BOTTLES BROKEN

TURTLENECKS (BOSLEY)

CHARACTER DEATHS

ROMANCE

Guess nothing happened with Willamena the librarian from Angels on Campus two episodes ago - here Bosley embarks upon his second romance of the season. Even if Pat was the bad guy, they actually made a very nice couple, to the point where you sort of hope he might give her a call when she gets out of prison. She did seem to genuinely care for him. This is the last of three times Bosley fell in love with the bad girl, as well as his final romance of the series.

Unfortunately, doomed romances are the only plot they can usually think of to toss Bosley's way when it's his turn for the spotlight - see Angels Ahoy and Angels in Waiting for more. Doesn't Bosley have any hobbies, interests or (male) friends?

FASHION

WHAT? SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE BAD GUY'S CREAKY LEATHER JACKET. We'd complain about the way all the characters wear the same thing every day, but maybe that's a good thing, because it makes them easier to keep track of.
Really the only thing noteworthy about this episode, fashionwise, is that they deserve credit for conducting an entire nautical episode without any of the Angels wearing anything remotely like swimwear (maybe because nobody wants to film bikini scenes at the marina in November). They show up to the marina in giant sweaters, each more hideous than the last, and Kris is really into swiss braids. After spending most of the episode in casual outfits, everyone seems overly dressed-up and bouffanted by comparison in the wrap-up scene.

SCREEN TIME ANALYSIS

This is one of only 6 episodes where Bosley has more screen time than any Angel, and it's his second-biggest solo story after Angels In Waiting.

KELLY

KRIS

TIFFANY

BOSLEY

HOW MUCH OF THE EPISODE HAS AT LEAST ONE ANGEL/BOSLEY IN IT64%

ACTION

Sorry, girls: Bosley's the hand-to-hand-combat action star of this episode, even if there wasn't much to be had. His action consists of grabbing a fire extinguisher off the wall and throwing it at a bad guy, knocking him down some stairs. Tiff does get to crash through a gate in the Pinto, though!

UNDERCOVER? THAT'S NOT ANY COVER AT ALL

Kelly's sketch artist routine is pretty much the worst stakeout ever. Nevermind her location, the main issue is: exactly how undercover does she think she is? She couldn't make a bigger spectacle of using her giant radio and binoculars, yet also never stops pantomiming her sketching. Even when Kris and Tiff show up and she starts talking to them, she's still drawing random lines on that easel without looking. Does the drawing hide everything else? For the cherry on top, she simply abandons the easel when she's done.

GATE CRASHING

Once again, the Angels crash through a gate without much thought to whom they might injure or kill on the other side. Luckily Bosley's already out of the way, and only a henchman is hit. Why is it almost always the Pinto that gets used to crash gates?

REPEAT OFFENDERS

Noah Keen(Dr. Post) also played the police Sergeant in Counterfeit Angels and the bank president in Angel on a Roll.

B.W. Sandefur also wrote Cruising Angels, Nips and Tucks, One Love... Two Angels, Waikiki Angels, Moonshinin' Angels, and Attack Angels.

OUR TAKE

Holly's Rating: Seeing the Pinto without Bri behind the wheel almost seems like the other Angels are driving her casket around. I find it disturbing. Would it have been so difficult to get Ford to provide another model for their new Angel? I guess.

Secondly, the other thing that stands out in this tedious hour is the forever unchanging Swiss Kris. It's like the hairdressers didn't think it was worth styling her hair this week, so they just left it looking like the lady from 50 First Dates.

50 First Cruises?

Anna's Rating: I want to pepperspray Kris and Tiffany. Seriously, why are they acting that way? Their teasing Bosley routine is not cute or funny, just condescending and obnoxious. All the Angels are written this way whenever he expresses any interest in a woman, but this time was the absolute worst. Kris: Does Bosley dance around smirking and giggling when YOU fall in love every other week, you numbskull? Tiff: I would not be comfy patronizing my new boss that way quite yet. Maybe you'll behave more professionally next year... in Boston.

Every show has a nautical episode and it's usually a flop. This one is so boring that I wrote this review and I still don't really know what the plot is. Fast-forwarding of the many non-Angel scenes is recommended - it seriously doesn't matter. Much as I love Bosley, his romance doesn't have me on the edge of my seat, and even the Angels' scenes are not that great. Easily the highlight would be the boat-crash scene, which contains moments of lighthearted and humorous Angel interplay - a welcome oasis in the desert that is the straight-faced boringness of the rest of the episode. Heave ho!

First, I have to give a couple of ‘action points’ to this episode. The angels crash the pinto through a warehouse door to gain entry and a henchman is struck by the door/car. He actually gets hit pretty hard so I give some points here as most of the stunts we see are much less intense.

Now I have some serious issues with the gold. First, gold bars are kind of heavy in case you haven’t heard, but the bad guys decide to put them in a cupboard that is hanging from the wall? And it doesn’t just come crashing down from having 500 pounds in it?!?!?

Better yet, everyone heads back to the office to tell Charlie that there is about $5million dollars in gold on his boat. Worried about its safety? “Tiffany is guarding it,” they tell Charlie. Yeah, there’s only four of us and we could only spare one person to guard the gold bars. Did you want us to actually leave someone else there too?

But then when Bosley is being held on the boat, suddenly everyone wants to head back. “Hey everyone, lets all go back and watch the boat from 60 yards away. I bet they won’t spot us!” Lackluster episode to say the least.

Larry Hamblin

Near the end when the angels are watching the bad guys unload the gold, then they get in the orange pinto, you’ll notice the chrome letters that spell out “FORD” has the “D” missing. But when they get to the warehouse the “D” in FORD is back on the car.
I can’t help liking the episode a lot. I give it 4 stars.

Anthonydeutsch

I liked it too, I think they were trying to break Tiff in by the writer trying to show she is more observant than the other two, first with the slip knots, then with the breaking glass, and then finding the gold, and they gave her alittle action scene at the end with the pinto. the pinto was always a big part of Sabrina but Tiff never showed much fondness for it so they changed that a little.I’m all for giving Tiff the chance to blend in with the others and gain alittle profile with the audience so I don’t want to nit pick each little rirelivant thing apart, just enjoy it for what it is.

Anthonydeutsch

I actually liked it because to me at least it shows Tiff getting acclimated and somewhat comfortable with her new co-workers, guess I like anything that shows chemistry between them. I also think Tiffany looks hot in cranberry or what ever color it is. She looked absolutely beautiful, she reminded me of Cheryl Teigs, they looked alike,Bosley on the other hand is working to hard at trying to score with Pat, kind of turned me off when he actually starts begging at dinner, even Pat’s snicker is telling. First time Tiffany ever resembled Sabrina driving the pinto and she did a good job at it.Weak on action but still entertaining. Written by guest writer B.W Sandefur. It’s now very clear these new writers were to develope the tiffany character and integrate her into the agency, by this time every episode was being written this way and it was working, ratings actually stabilized at #17 along with chips. It just was a little too little and a little too late, we were just getting to know and like Tiff and poof gone, never to be seen or heard from again.

’70s Chick

Zzzzzzz…..Oh, oops. sorry, just got done trying to watch this episode again. Like Anna mentioned, what really is the plot here, and which bad guy is with which bad guy? The only person I feel badly for in this episode is the nurse at the harbor doc’s office, because she was obviously played by some minor extra trying to break into TV and then when she gets her big chance she just looks like a human version of some kind of weird Precious Moments nurse doll that you would find in a Hallmark store. Let’s check her resume’ on IMDB and see just how much this part jump started her career. Atamian is creepy, and it just isn’t right for Barbara Douglas to be kissing him when you know that Steve Douglas is probably sitting at home, sucking on his pipe, and wondering why she’s so late. Kris’ hair is a fright in this episode, the sweaters are late ’70s “fashion” at it’s worst (and for anyone here who lived through the ’70s, you know how bad that is), and when the Angels openly ridicule Bosley for being interested in a smart, attractive woman his age, you just want to knock them overboard with the gold bars tied to their feet and Atamian’s leather jacket wrapped around their arms like a strait jacket. Oh,and didn’t anyone ever warn Tiffany that it isn’t safe to drive around in a car after the rear view mirror has apparently fallen off, as I’m sure was the norm for any Pinto hatchback after about the first six months or so. Bleh. This episode is one of the worst ever!

Anthonydeutsch

I don’t think Pat Justice could be considered smart, hell anyone could see atamian was a pretty bad criminal, I think the girls were busting bosley’s balls because for one thing it is generally out of character for him to be hitting on a woman, and two he was trying to impress her by bullshitting her, trying to imply that he and his associate bought the yacht and have interests worldwide. The girls thought it was funny and were only razzing him, because he was working hard at trying to score.

Jimbo

I didn’t think it was so bad! I loved the action at the end. Too many Charlie’s Angels episodes just ended with the gun-toting Angels telling the bad guys the jig was up. This one had some excitement.

Anthonydeutsch

Tiffany attended the sabrina duncan school of driving, one of the few times Tiff actually put the pinto to use ala sabrina, fun episode, maybe if bosley wasn’t making and acting so desperate trying to score with pat justice the girls wouldn’t have busted his balls so much, i guess this was david doyles chance to step out in a season of solo adventures. Tiff gets smart points again and she looks hot also, love her gun pose after crashing the door and accosting one of the bad guys.once we look past some of the obvious unrealistic events it is a fun episode, i like when the girls are just having fun and not getting kidnapped or having to rely on sexism to get through a case. It allows us the viewers to relax and just enjoy the campiness and cheese.